Week 1 of Major Work

This week we visited Gallery: 5 Crown Lane in order to get a good look and feel for the space in which we will be exhibiting our major works. Lucas also assigned us into groups of 3 for this collaborative project, I’m assuming this is because he wanted us to get to know each other better and broaden our social horizons. I’m not sure how he went about selecting groups – whether he pulled names from a hat or made conscious decisions, but I must say his group arrangements were interesting to analyse who Lucas thought were compatible together.

My group consists of Sarah (who practises more traditional art), Davis (who practises between photography and video) and myself (dabbling between photography/film and sound). Unfortunately, each member of our group has vastly different Uni timetables making it difficult to do work outside of Mondays.

So our first plan of attack for this assignment was to figure out each persons artistic abilities and perspectives. We found it difficult to come up with an idea that could balance between Sarahs traditional background and Davis and I’s new media art background. The idea’s that we came up with were dominated by new media concepts and technical jargon that Sarah probably couldn’t understand or have an interest for. So in a way our group is quite democratic at the moment (2 media artists vs 1 traditional) which probably needs to change if we are going to get anywhere.

Anyway, here are some of the early idea’s that we manifested:

– Presenting the OUTSIDE world INSIDE a space — Set up an Array of speakers inside the gallery, each projecting samples of sound from the outside world (sounds which are representive of different social environments). This could be done the form of a sound scape or even take a narrative form. This idea involves alot of field recording work and equipment. There were also other variations to this idea such as using hanging headphones instead of speakers to make it a more private affair.
-Creating a sort of walking experience which brogan and Lucas were quite keen towards.
– We could create a sort of ‘treasure hunt’ where we give participants a map to follow which essentially lead them around various social contexts in the neighbouring area. Obviously this would be more purpose driven – we just haven’t come up with a clear purpose yet.
– We also considered doing a walk where the participants are ‘forced’ to follow the commands given to them by an omnipotent voice (through audio headphones). Kind of like this but with a much more artistic driven purpose and less tacky http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBh5dh5ESGM – I guess this video just shows an example of the delivery of the work.

We were also thinking of various installations that we could do in gallery 5, but none of these really had a solid concept.

Our next step is to choose/merge our ideas to solidify what we will be doing and begin working on it.